Ethical Challenges and Code of Conduct for Indian LIS Professionals

Almost every recognised profession runs on a quiet promise: that the people inside it will behave responsibly even when no one is watching. Doctors have one, lawyers have one, and so do chartered accountants. Library and information science is no different in spirit, yet it carries a strange gap. Formal library education in India began as far back as 1911, but more than a century later the profession still has no officially recognised, enforceable national code of ethics. This post explains why that gap exists, the scholars who tried to fill it, the guidelines they proposed, and what a real solution might look like.

Why a national ethical code is still missing 🔗

The simplest answer is that there is no single authority empowered to create and enforce such a code. In most professions, a statutory body, like the Medical Council or the Bar Council, registers practitioners, sets ethical standards, and can penalise members who break them. Librarianship in India has no equivalent. There are several library associations operating at the national and state levels, but none of them holds legal power to license librarians or remove anyone for misconduct.

This matters because a code of ethics only works when the profession as a whole takes responsibility for enforcing it. If members ignore violations and no body takes action, the code simply becomes ineffective. A document that cannot be applied is little more than a statement of good intentions.

There is also the question of who should draft it. Researchers have pointed out that in the absence of any government agency to approve an LIS ethical code, the realistic path is for a national-level association to bring all the others onto a common platform and produce a collaborative document. So far, that coordination has not produced a binding result. The contrast with the wider world is striking. The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions notes that library associations in more than 60 countries have developed and approved national codes for librarians.

What India does have 🔗

It would be wrong to say nothing exists. The Joint Council of Library Associations in India (JOCLAI) prepared a draft code in 1989, and a study published in Library Management later examined how special library professionals across the country relate to its values. There have also been thoughtful individual proposals. The problem is not a shortage of ideas. It is the absence of a recognised body to convert those ideas into a standard that the whole profession formally adopts and follows.

The Indian scholars who shaped professional ethics 🔗

For decades, the work of defining ethics for Indian librarianship was carried forward not by an institution but by individual thinkers. Their writings, often part of LIS textbooks and seminar papers, remain the foundation of how the subject is taught today.

A.K. Mukherjee and the twenty points 🔗

A.K. Mukherjee argued that the heart of being a professional is the constant awareness that you exist to provide quality service to users. He proposed a twenty-point code of ethics built around this idea. His points stressed that a librarian must keep faith in the value of the work itself, defend the freedoms of study, thought, speech, the press, the circulation of knowledge, and instruction, and be a genuine reader who is eager to help others reach information. In his view, libraries had repeatedly proved that they enrich community life, and the librarian had to hold on to belief in that mission.

Megnanand and the web of relationships 🔗

Megnanand approached ethics from a different angle. Rather than listing personal qualities, he focused on the relationships a librarian has to manage every day. He suggested that any code should address the librarian’s dealings with the library committee, the staff, the book suppliers, professional colleagues, the clientele, society, and the state. This relationship-based framing is useful because it recognises that ethical problems rarely appear in the abstract. They show up in concrete situations: a purchase decision, a hiring choice, a request from an authority.

R.L. Mittal and the duties of a librarian 🔗

R.L. Mittal described the ethics of librarianship as the conduct and behaviour of those who adopt the profession. He treated Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science as the cardinal principles on which ethical behaviour should rest. From there he organised a librarian’s obligations into duties to the Public, to Books, to the Profession, to the Staff, and to Himself. Mittal is also associated with the idea of the Seven Lamps of Conduct, a set of guiding principles described as essential for library professionals, covering qualities such as fair and impartial book selection, putting service before self, and a commitment to scholarship. On the basis of these duties he prepared a draft code of ethics for the profession.

Amitabha Chatterjee and the core values 🔗

Amitabha Chatterjee engaged with professional ethics through forums such as a national seminar of the Indian Association of Special Libraries and Information Centres in the 1980s, and continued to recommend facets of a code in later years. He argued that a code should rest on values like loyalty, integrity, cooperation, service above self, devotion to duty, impartiality, and allegiance to the laws of the land. These are deliberately broad. They are meant to act as anchors that hold steady even as technology and job descriptions change.

Other scholars, including P.S.G. Kumar, also wrote extensively on the objectives and implementation of professional ethics, reinforcing the point that the intellectual groundwork has long been in place.

The proposed ethical guidelines in practice 🔗

When you put these contributions together, a fairly complete picture of professional conduct emerges. The proposed guidelines are best understood as a set of obligations a librarian owes to different groups.

Relationship with staff 🔗

A librarian usually leads a team, so the treatment of staff is treated as an ethical matter, not just a management one. The expectation is fair supervision, encouragement of the professional growth of co-workers, and a working environment where personal bias does not interfere with duties. This mirrors a wider principle in the field that professionals should foster the development of colleagues and aspiring members of the profession, an idea also reflected in the American Library Association’s code.

Relationship with book suppliers 🔗

Dealings with the book trade are a known pressure point. A librarian decides what to buy and from whom, which creates an obvious risk of favouritism or kickbacks. The proposed guidelines respond with the principle of impartial selection: materials should be chosen on their merit and the community’s needs, never on personal benefit or a supplier’s inducement. Keeping selection impersonal protects both the collection and public money, a concern that is sharper in publicly funded Indian libraries.

Relationship with professional colleagues 🔗

Ethics also governs how librarians treat one another across institutions. Cooperation, fair credit for work, honesty in professional dealings, and refusing to undercut peers are all part of the expected conduct. A profession that competes destructively within itself struggles to earn outside respect, which is why values like cooperation and integrity appear so often in these proposals.

The practical difficulties 🔗

Implementing any of this has never been easy. One recurring obstacle is the steady entry of specialists from other disciplines into library and information roles, which makes a shared professional identity harder to maintain. Add the lack of an enforcement body, uneven awareness among practitioners, and the rapid changes brought by digital services, and you can see why good guidelines have stayed on paper. Even so, scholars are clear that these difficulties do not remove the need for professional ethics; they make it more urgent.

The future of LIS ethics in India 🔗

The path forward is not really a mystery. The intellectual content already exists, scattered across textbooks, the JOCLAI draft, and international references. What is missing is a single, credible professional body with the authority to adopt a code, register practitioners, and act when the code is broken.

International practice offers a sensible model rather than a ready-made answer. The IFLA code, endorsed in 2012, was explicitly designed as a reference for associations creating or revising their own codes, and it states clearly that it is not meant to replace national efforts. In other words, India is expected to draft its own through research, consultation, and cooperative work, not to import one wholesale. Existing values around service, intellectual freedom, privacy, and equitable access give a strong starting frame.

A workable future would likely involve the leading associations agreeing to a common platform, producing a single document, and building at least a voluntary mechanism for accountability while the case for statutory recognition is made. Until something like that happens, ethics in Indian librarianship will keep running on individual conscience and academic discussion rather than on a binding professional standard. The technical knowledge of the profession has advanced enormously; the formal ethical architecture is the part still waiting to be built.

What do you think? If India’s library associations finally agreed on one code, would a voluntary standard be enough to change everyday behaviour, or does real accountability require a statutory body with the power to enforce it? And among the duties proposed by these scholars, which one do you believe is most often tested in a working library today?

References

1. http://op.niscair.res.in/index.php/ALIS/article/download/19030/465464653
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337059654_Professional_Codes_of_Ethics_in_LIS
3. https://www.ifla.org/professional-codes-of-ethics-for-librarians/
4. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/lm-06-2014-0071/full/html
5. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/35277/5/Unit-12.pdf
6. https://www.librarywaves.com/index.php/lw/article/download/52/54
7. https://www.ala.org/tools/ethics